Prayer for Beginners

By Peter Kreeft

Peter Kreeft brings his unique insights to this most important area of our spiritual lives. He claims he himself is still a beginner in prayer, and this book is for all those, like him, who feel that they are not good at praying but desire to become much better at it. Thus, Kreeft offers simple, but profound advice and practical steps for developing a prayer life based on the time-tested wisdom of the saints and great spiritual writers, especially the principles found in Brother Lawrence's classic, The Practice of the Presence of God.

In short, straight-forward and unsentimental chapters, Kreeft covers all the key areas for understanding and developing that intimate form of communication with our Creator that we call prayer. He covers such areas as the necessity of prayer, various motives and methods, steps, patience, suffering, sin, faith, and grace.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ignatius Press
• Release date: Sep 3, 2009
• ISBN: 9781681493855

Peter Kreeft

Peter Kreeft (PhD, Fordham University) is professor of philosophy at Boston College where he has taught since 1965. A popular lecturer, he has also taught at many other colleges, seminaries and educational institutions in the eastern United States. Kreeft has written more than fifty books, including The Best Things in Life, The Journey, How to Win the Culture War, and Handbook of Christian Apologetics (with Ronald Tacelli).

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

How This Book Is Different

There are thousands of books on how to pray, some of them very good ones. Why another? How is this one different?

Because this one could have been titled "Prayer for Dummies&rdquo, prayer for people who are not very good at praying, people who find it hard to pray, not people who find it easy—in other words, people like me.

And it is also prayer for Marthas, not for Marys: for people with little time to pray, busy people who keep finding excuses not to pray—in other words, people like me.

Much of it is based on principles found in Brother Lawrence’s little classic The Practice of the Presence of God, which I have found the simplest, most practical book for beginners, for dummies, and for Marthas.

You would not be reading this book if you did not believe that prayer was worth working at, that real contact with God in prayer was something precious and powerful and worth your effort. But neither would you be reading this book if you had not experienced difficulty and failure in praying. What you need is not an advanced book on prayer, or even an intermediate one, but a beginner’s book. You also need a practical book, written by somebody like you, a beginner with the same problems you have, somebody who knows what does not work for busy, distracted, not-very-holy people like you—and also knows something that does.

1

NECESSITY

Why Praying Is More

Important than Eating

Eating keeps your body alive, and prayer keeps your soul alive. Praying is more important than eating because your soul is more important than your body. Your soul is more important than your body because your soul is you, your personality, your self. You will get a new body after death, in the resurrection at the end of the world. But you will not get a new soul; you will only purify and sanctify your old one, because you are your soul. The you that will get a new body is your soul.

Praying keeps your soul alive because prayer is real contact with God, and God is the life of the soul as the soul is the life of the body. If you do not pray, your soul will wither and die, just as, if you do not eat, your body will wither and die.

So a book that can make the difference between not praying and praying is a book that can change your life.

This book can change your life if and only if you do two things with it.

First, you must read it, not as you read other books, but slowly and thoughtfully (that is why I made it very short) and above all prayerfully, that is, under the eye of God, in the presence of Truth and therefore in absolute honesty.

Second, you must actually do it, not just read about doing it, think about doing it, understand how to do it, plan to do it, or imagine yourself doing it. It is a cookbook, not a dinner.

Do not be like the theologian who after death was given the choice between going to Heaven or going to a lecture on Heaven and chose the lecture.

Reading a book about doing something can be an obstacle to doing it because it gives you the impression that you are doing what you are only thinking about doing. It is tempting to remain in the comfortable theater of the imagination instead of the real world, to fall in love with the idea of becoming a saint and loving God and neighbor instead of doing the actual work, because the idea makes no demands on you. It is like a book on a shelf. But, as Dostoyevsky says, love in action is a harsh and dreadful thing compared to love in dreams (The Brothers Karamazov). A dream, or an idea, is a flattering addition to our mind; it does not demand any subtraction, any sacrifice of time and effort, as reality does.

One common cause of this mistake of preferring to imagine and admire a great ideal instead of beginning to do little deeds is our impatience with little baby steps, our lack of humility. In the real world we have to learn to crawl before we walk and walk before we run. This book does not teach you how to run, or even walk, at prayer; it teaches you how to crawl.

2

MOTIVES

Ten Compelling Reasons to Pray

1. Why pray? Because only prayer can save the world

Some say that prayer, and the spiritual life, or the inner life, or the soul’s private love affair with God, is an unaffordable luxury today, or an irresponsible withdrawal from the pressing public problems of our poor, hurting world. I say just the opposite: that nothing, nothing is more relevant and responsible; that nothing else can ever cure our sick world except saints, and saints are never made except by prayer.

Nothing but saints can save our world because the deepest root of all the world’s diseases is sin, and saints are the antibodies that fight sin.

Nothing but prayer can make saints because nothing but God can make saints, and we meet God in prayer. Prayer is the hospital for souls where we meet Doctor God.

2. There is an even better reason to pray than the fact that only prayer can save the world. We must pray because God commands it

We pray, not simply as some solitary self-improvement program, but because we have been addressed by God. Prayer is a response to a prior divine invitation.

No, invitation is too weak. God commands us to pray, in fact to constantly (1 Thess 5:17). He yearns and longs for us to pray more passionately than any earthly lover yearns for his beloved to turn her eyes and her attention to him. (All earthly loves are tiny droplets of his infinite sea of love; he is where all love comes from, whether we receive it pure or whether we pollute it.)

We pray to obey God, not to play God. We pray, not to change God’s mind, but to change our own; not to command God, but to let God command us. We pray to let God be God. Prayer is our obedience to God even when it asks God for things, for God has commanded us to ask (Mt 7:7).

3. But why did God command prayer? Whatever God does, he does for good reasons

Three reasons God commands us to pray correspond to our three deepest needs, the fundamental needs of the three powers of our soul: prayer gives truth to our mind, goodness to our will, and beauty to our heart. The true, the good, and the beautiful are the three things we need and love the most, because they are three attributes of God.

Prayer gives truth to our mind because it puts us in the presence of Truth itself, the divine Mind who designed our minds and our lives and our whole universe.

It gives goodness to our will because it puts us on line with God, in love with the God who is love and goodness. That is his essence. In prayer we become like the God we pray to and conform to; we catch the good infection of Godliness by contact.

It gives beauty to our heart because it plunges us into the heart of God, which is the eternal energy of infinite joy. That is why it gives us joy and peace and delight and happiness.

4. We should pray because God’s

Reviews for Prayer for Beginners

[bookwyrmm_1 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

Some good thoughts, some I am not sure of, but the big issue was the narrator just did not fit - her accent took away from when Kreeft talked about being American and her voice was very zen, making the whole book sound like a long meditation.

[nicholasjjordan · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Exactly as the title promises, for beginners and for helping people begin praying. This is a beautiful and perfect little book, one of those you can't read slowly enough. I drew on it to lead a church small group in developing disciplined prayer habits.

One little warning: hard-line Protestants may find it too Catholic. Purgatory and Mary and the saints all show up early. But that really shouldn't dissuade you from a great little book.

[allenkeith · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This is an excellent book for both the beginner and the more advanced. Like most others of Peter Kreeft's books it is written with both clarity and cogency. He gets to the point. There are 18 very brief chapters that draw you along from one chapter to the next. Even the most experienced will have a gain by reading this book. If it's not a classic he may become one as it ought.